Storage Area Network Solutions?

TJPile asks: "I work for a larger advertising company with offices all over the US and soon Europe and Asia. Due to our growth in the past year, our current archive/storage system cannot fulfill our needs. Others in my IT team have been talking with Dell about a storage area network. I will be the one administering this system and I was wondering if anyone in the Slashdot community has ever dealt with this before. I know we will be needing some heavy metal along the lines of an SMP Sun or SGI box. We need a system that can support (at max) about 100 simultaneous users working on large image files stored on the server. We also need cataloging software that will allow PC/Mac users to browse documents via thumbnails and job numbers. What do you guys think?" The previous two articles that touched on this subject didn't get much traffic, and were posted at least 6 months ago. Has the intervening time provided more advancements in this area?

Comments

Think NetApp.

[jfrisby]

We have a bunch of NetApps where I work (don't ask) -- they are blindingly fast (something like 6,000 NFS ops/sec with 10ms latency) with oodles of space (hundreds of GB or more) and loas of redundancy. You can get them with dual fiber channels from each head unit to the disk shelves, and you can cluster two of them together so that if a head unit fails, the other just takes over...

Very impressive, relatively cheap... And oh yeah -- no Sun box required since they just hook straight up to your LAN. (100Mb, or 1,000Mb Ethernet...)

-JF

Buy this, don't build it. You will save grief.

[human bean]

Designing a storage-area-network that has better performance than a traditional client-server storage model is not a trivial task. Yes, you can put all the pieces together in the right ways, but can you make it go faster and hold more?

A major part of the operation of this sort of system is tuning it to the actual data and use patterns of your particular users. Note that not all of your users are the same, and that you will probably have to compromise on the tuning. Even though systems like this are supposed to be redundant, don't forget to build in enough network capacity for data backup servers.

Best bet is to buy a Network Appliance or one of the SUN arrays, and get it over with. Of the two I would go with the Net App boxes.

The other factor is the networking outside of your SAN, that is, now that you have the data online how do your processors get to it? If you are doing image-at-a-time load-work-save sorts of work patterns, then you will have less of a traffic load. If you are doing batch image processing one-right-after-another, then you are going to need all the bandwidth you can get. Doing larger geo models, we found that gigabit ethernet was needed from workstations (SGI Octanes) down to the storage farm. Trunked ethernet just didn't do it.

YMMV. Get a sniffer and do a study on your traffic to get a feel for what you need.